Launched as part of a larger project on Christian jurists sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, this collection of essays originated in a conference of distinguished Russian and American scholars of history, law, and religious studies held at Emory in 2019. The essays explore Russian legal culture by addressing the specific contributions of more than a dozen Orthodox jurists in modern Russia. Separate essays treat individual jurists, ranging chronologically from Vasilii Malinovskii (1765–1814) to Ivan Il΄in (1883–1954). One essay, from Vera Shevzov, reaches beyond individual biography to document very effectively the development of church and canon law instruction in Russia's theological academies and, particularly, its secular universities.
The volume opens with two broadly synthesizing essays by editors Randall Poole and Paul Valliere. Poole's essay addresses Russian legal consciousness which, in the best tradition of the late Harold Berman, is seen as a movement emerging out of opposition to legal positivism. For Poole, the Russian thinkers profiled in the collection were Christian theists who grounded their views of law upon a moral universe that embraced concepts of human dignity and human rights. Thus, for Poole, there is a line of connection linking the natural law theory of Aleksandr Kunitsyn with the subsequent legal reforms of 1864 and the deepening legal consciousness found later in the Christian personalism of the Russian religious renaissance. Paul Valliere's essay on law and the Orthodox Church focuses on canon law and church law, and the distinctions between the two—canon law, on the one hand, reflecting the positive ecclesiastical law as espoused in the ninth-century Nomocanon and in subsequent commentaries; church law, by contrast, addressing state or civil laws pertaining to the church. Valliere surveys the development of both canon and church law over the course of a millennium, ending with the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–18, which he calls “by far the greatest church assembly in the history of Orthodox Christianity since the end of antiquity” (46).
Several of the individual biographical portraits reflect work previously published, such as William Butler's essay on Vasilii Malinovskii and Gary Hamburg's essay on Boris Chicherin. That is also true in the case of Julia Berest's excellent essay on the underappreciated Aleksandr Kunitsyn (1783–1840), pioneer of natural law in Russia (see her 2011 Palgrave/Macmillan monograph on Kunitsyn, The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840). Despite state efforts to confiscate copies of his landmark two-volume Pravo estestvennoe (1818–20), and despite his dismissal from St. Petersburg University, Kunitsyn was a survivor whose contributions, including his legal codification work in the Second Section of His Majesty's Own Chancellery, are neatly summarized by Berest. Gregory L. Freeze's essay on Konstantin Pobedonostsev is new to this collection, and even includes issues such as Pobedonostsev's translation of the New Testament frequently overlooked by historians. Pobedonostsev arguably does not quite fit alongside biographical portraits of Russian legal philosophers, but Freeze's account serves to balance a collection that is dominated by portraits of more liberal thinkers. Freeze's concluding point is worth noting—namely, that the conservatism of Pobedonostsev, including support for unlimited autocracy, restricted freedom of conscience, and counterreform measures directed against the 1864 Judicial Reform Act has gained new currency within the nationalist conservatism of contemporary Russia.
Among the other excellent biographical essays in the collection, four by participating Russian scholars stand out. Tatiana Borisova's essay on the civic religion of Anatolii Koni (1844–1927) offers a glimpse into the world of those jurists who enthusiastically sought to use the vehicle of the Judicial Reform Act of 1864 to advance morally-grounded social justice. Borisova sees the trial and acquittal of Vera Zasulich over which Koni presided in the St. Petersburg District Court as a stage set for the dramatic conflict between old and new principles of Russian jurisprudence after 1864. Both as judge and as public homilist, Koni offered in Borisova's view a form of “civic heroism in the service of mercy, reconciliation, and justice” (168). Vladimir Tomsinov, in one of his essays within the collection, tackles the work of the prodigious Moscow University international jurist, Leonid Kamarovskii (1846–1912), who wrote not only on the Balkans, but on a myriad of international legal issues. Tomsinov's Kamarovskii is a humane, idealistic writer whose commitment to international peace and the rule of law was grounded on Christian ethics. Much less well recognized was another Russian advocate of global peace, Nikolai Alekseev (1879–1964), the subject of Martin Beisswenger's contribution to the collection. According to Beisswenger, Alekseev was notable among the wave of idealist jurists coming out of the early twentieth-century Russian religious renaissance for his political activism—protesting imperial Russian policies, engaging in Russian revolutionary politics, joining White armies in the Crimea during the Civil War, and ultimately linking his peace activities with the Christian ecumenical movement. Among the talented Russian contributors is also Konstantin Antonov of St. Tikhon's Orthodox University in Moscow, who looks at another of the idealist Russian Christian jurists of the early twentieth century, the philosopher of law Pavel Novgorodtsev (1866–1924). A contributor to Problemy Idealisma, a Cadet who participated in the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–18, and a philosopher who sought to rehabilitate the significance of natural law theory, Novgorodtsev in his later more conservative period was among those who exercised, in Antonov's view, major influence on a generation of the Russian emigration.
Reference to Novgorodtsev, who was born in Bakhmut, the Ukrainian city in the Donetsk region now left in rubble, calls to mind what is unique to the anthology, and what has changed since the contributors first came together in 2019. The Orthodox Christian jurists who are the subjects of this volume were all operating out of a moral universe that affirmed the rule of law and human dignity—international principles that were often at odds with the policies of tsarist and Soviet authorities they were willing to challenge. Today those principles are again under threat, as is the open travel of Russian and American scholars which made this volume possible.
